communication underload

an empty mailbox is so depressing.

i'm a very "communication" person - i love to talk, i love to text, i love to chat, i love to scrap, i love to comment one my friends' blogs, i love to receive and send e-mail. till around a week ago, i used to reply to pretty much every single mail that reached my inbox (excluding spam and notifications of course :D).

for the past few months, ever since most of my MCA class started working, we've been in touch solely through email, specifically through this yahoo group that's exclusively for my classmates. not stuff like "how are you" and "how's work" (because most people are usually fine, and work is usually the same today as it was yesterday), but random conversations over email. for example, someone forwards/posts a message on the group, then someone replies to it with one line of his/her thoughts/comments, then someone replies to that reply, and so on. we had email threads that were 50 messages long and counting...and sometimes multiple threads simultaneously running (is this sounding like a java program?? whatever :D). i loved it. at this rate, it felt like i'd never lose touch with some of my best friends, and those awesome times we've had at VJTI will continue, even though we end up in different cities or even countries.

it was too good to last.

some of my friends started complaining that there are way too many posts on the group, and their mailboxes were being flooded, and that they had to resort to bulk deleting of group mail. so they asked me to stop replying to group mails. i told them they could filter all group mail into a separate folder, maybe ignore a thread if they've seen that the originating message wasn't useful. they told me to stop replying to group mails instead. i said, ok, i'll stop. but it was too hard a habit for me to break, and i didnt want to kill this community over something as petty. i went back to my usual replying in a few hours. i also gave them my whole reasoning about keeping in touch etc etc. they were unimpressed. a month later, they asked me to stop once again. some of my friends who i know read my mail and also love to talk to me in my offline life, also supported their request. it was very depressing. i felt betrayed. after all, i wasn't doing all this for myself, i was doing it because our class was such an amazing community, it would have been a shame to dismantle it just because some of my classmates didn't realise the value of something they had and were about to lose.

anyway, that was the last straw. i decided to stick by my resolution this time. i've replied only a single digit no of times this week. initially there were a few others who used to reply, some threads that took a few days to lose their momentum. now it's all stopped. other than a couple of college notices, there are around 5 people posting mails, which are (pretty much all) senseless forwards that i've read before. not even one line added by the person forwarding the message.

this community is officially dead. i'm sorry, but i'm not gonna revive it. if you wanna keep in touch with me, mail me a personally addressed message, or call me. i'm pretty sure you will do neither. in that case, goodbye. it was nice knowing you.